Comics and Cartoons

One of the newest ways for students to incorporate technology into a project for their class is to create a comic strip online.  There are at least half a dozen comic strip websites that students can choose from.  I will be discussing three of those, while providing links to the other comic strip websites.  Every place I have looked online discusses one or two of them, but never provides you an option for viewing the others.  I will provide you with links to the ones that I do not discuss.

 
GoAnimate - Cartoon and Animation Creator
The neat thing about GoAnimate is that you are not creating a comic strip, but you are creating a cartoon.  With GoAnimate you can create your own character, or select one of the many already created for you.  You can select from a wide variety of backgrounds as well as artifacts.  Since it is animated you can select from a number of actions for all your characters as well as emotions.  You can also move your characters from one scene to another without any interuption.  The most amazing thing is how easy it is to learn how to use the software to create the cartoon.  See the video below for a short tutorial.


 
Pixton - Comic Book Page Creator
Pixton is less detailed in terms of options than GoAnimate, but it still offers tons of options for creating your comic book type page.  You have the ability choose your characters, backgounds, artifacts, and different thought/word bubbles.  For quicker projects, this would be a more ideal software to use.  Although Pixton does allow animation, it is not near as detailed as GoAnimate. 

Toondoo - Comic Strip Creation


Toondoo I think is the best Comic Strip Creation tool.  You create a comic strip just like you see in the Sunday paper.  It provides you with a lot of the characters and backgrounds, you provide the text.  Several students at my school have used them.  They created some as part of an assignment on parables.  You can view them here.  I highly suggest you visit and play around with the site before showing it to your students.  It is very user friendly as well.  Students will need to create an account though.

Other Comic Strip Creation Websites

       

HOW COULD YOU USE COMIC/CARTOON CREATION IN CLASS?

• Create a comics to portray a message/symbol/image from a poem
• Create a comic about a science experiment in class
• Create a funny comic about solving a math problem
• Create a Math Word Problem in comic strip form
• Recreate historical events
• Create a Short Story in Comic Form
• Portray scenes from a novel
• Have students create a comic in a foreign language

You get the idea!  Do you know of any others?  Please share them.

Glogster in the Classroom

I previously posted about Glogster for Education. But I have learned more and wanted to share that information with you as well as ideas for using it in your classroom. Hope this helps!

Glogster For Education is a GREAT tool to use in your classroom.  It is important that you make sure that your firewall is cleared for you to use the site fully though.  I know that you can run into a problem with being able to type on the blog.  You can do every other feature, but you cannot add text.

It is also important that if you request your students to print their glog that you make sure they do not have text that is longer then the area they used to type the information in, because it won't print.

Now, lets discuss Glogster for Education.  Through this website you can create a virtual class, FOR FREE.  You can include up to 200 students.  When you create your class and input your students it creates a unique Username and Password for each student that consists of numbers and letters.  Students can change their password, but the Username will stay the same.  They can change their Screen name though.  I suggest first name and last name so that you can easily track them.  As they work on their project, you have a Teacher Screen where you can see their progress.  This way you can easily monitor where they are on their project.  They can't lie and say they aren't finished when they really are, and you can make sure they are not including anything inappropriate.

Glogster is a virtual Posterboard.  So the possibilities are endless and they are easy to present.  If you have a webpage, they are also very easy to post to your own webpage as well.  You can see a sample of my own in my other blog.
So, How can you use Glogster in your Classroom?  Take all those projects you used to have students do on a Poster Board and have them do it on a Glog.

• Create a Virtual Collage from images, audio, and video from the web.
  
• Create a step by step glog of a math problem or concept
  
• Create a biography of someone in history going down the glog as they get older
  
• Create a timeline of events
  
• Showcase an experiment in class
  
• Give directions on how to do something.
  
• Create a review of a book, movie, restaurant, play, etc.
  
• Create a glog for pages in a yearbook
  
• Create a glog about an event for the school news or newspaper
  
• Create a Compare and Contrast Glog
  
• Create a Vocabulary Glog for your students
  
• Create a Glog Syllabus
  
• Create a Glog Chapter Review for chapters of a textbook (Would make a great end of the year activity)
  
• Create a "Who Am I" Glog to get to know your students.  Great Icebreaker
  
• Create a Family Tree Glog

I could keep going....but you get the idea!  Here is my sample....

SchoolForge

SchoolForge.net is website dedicated to offering free software for schools.  The software is normally Open Source.  The website offers 7 different categories for you to search for this open source material.  Those categories are then broken up into sub categories. 
There is Multimedia software that is available for 3D Animation, Graphic Editing, Players, Sound and Video Editing.  There is Antivirus and Spyware software.  There is also Education Software that provides games and edutainment.  There are Office Tools Software that is available for desktop publishing, Office Applications, and Text Editing.  Utlities and Drivers is another section that focuses on Archive, CDROM/DVD, Drivers, Networking Tools, and Security.   Finally there is Web-Based Software, which is all the rage because of Web 2.0.  You can find software for Learning Management, Library Management, and Student Information Systems as well.

Before using any of this and downloading anything, you should probably check with your school and district about how they feel about Freeware and Open Source Software.  I have seen some of the software available on this site and know many districts in other states that are looking at Open Source software for their school systems as a way to save money.

See what there might be available that will assist you in your classroom, school, or district.

Edublog Awards Part II

Recently, as in last week, I nominated some of my favorite blogs.  Recently all the nominations made by edubloggers all over the world are being shared.  This would be a great way for you to view some of those other edubloggers I was talking about that I have yet to visit.

The Edublog Awards have created a widget that tracks the web for "2009 Edublog Awards"  You can view other peoples nominations very easily through this feed.  Check out all the nominations...when you have time and see what other people see as great and useable resources.

Miscellaneous Links

Desktop To Do List - Every teacher knows one, if not more than one.  The teacher who has their monitor covered in Post-it notes with reminders and task they need to get done.  Yeah, Outlook comes with one and so does Google.  But I wanted one on my desktop.  So I found one.  Visit http://www.scattrbrain.com/ to download a desktop to do list software.  I like it, but I wish it would minimize it to the toolbar instead of the taskbar.  It is handy and colorful, so it makes it very easy to view.  You can link it to your Google Calendar as well as set due dates.

Web 2.0 resources - Came across this on Steve Anderson's Blog, Blogging About The Web2.0 Connected Classroom.  Livebinders is another version of social Bookmarking.  I like it the best because of the organization and viewing features.  It provides a page view of the website instead of just text, so it helps you easily remember what the page is for.  In Steve Anderson's Blog, he shared Livebinders 4 teachers.  They are broken down by General, Subjects, and Grade.  At first glance, I thought how useful.  Then I realized, that my own Livebinders were being shared.  Under Web 2.0 tools, here is my LiveBinder that is being shared by the author, Barbara Tallent.  So thanks to her for sharing my information.  You could easily use LiveBinders in your classroom by creating a set for students to use for research purposes.  Of course there are other Social Bookmarking sites like Delicious, Diigo, and Stumbleupon.  There are others.  But these are the ones I see used the most.

Shmoop - Study Guides and Teacher Resources - Really more for the English and Social Studies Teachers out there, but it seems this is one USEFUL website.  I have not had a chance to glance through it all, but when you have the time, I suggest you do so.  Lots of useful primary documents for a multitude of subject matter in the English and Social Studies Subject Matter.

Couple Nings - You will see this on the side of my Blog, but I wanted to post them here as well.  I have joined both of these Social Networks created on Ning, and they provide a lot of useful information as well as share some of the same problems, praise, and stories that as teachers we come across daily.  Classroom 2.0 and The Educators PLN.  If you join, look me up and add me as a colleague.

I will be posting some links for website creation that your students can use in the classroom.  We are looking at creating webpages at my school for Math Tutorials, Book Reviews, Biographies, etc.